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by Florence Knapp
In the wake of a catastrophic storm, Cora sets off with her nine-year-old daughter, Maia, to register her son's birth. Her husband, Gordon, a local doctor, respected in the community but a terrifying and controlling presence at home, intends for her to name the infant after him. But when the registrar asks what she'd like to call the child, Cora hesitates...
Spanning thirty-five years, what follows are three alternate and alternating versions of Cora's and her young son's lives, shaped by her choice of name. In richly layered prose, The Names explores the painful ripple effects of domestic abuse, the messy ties of family, and the possibilities of autonomy and healing.
With exceptional sensitivity and depth, Knapp draws us into the story of one family, told through a prism of what-ifs, causing us to consider the "one ... precious life" we are given. The book's brilliantly imaginative structure, propulsive storytelling, and emotional, gut-wrenching power are certain to make The Names a modern classic.
The prologue of Florence Knapp's marvelous debut, The Names, begins on October 16, 1987, the day after the Great Storm hit England. We meet Cora, a young woman of Irish descent, as she and her nine-year-old daughter, Maia, push a pram through the debris, walking to a government office to officially register her new son's name. As the pair struggle along, they discuss what the child should be called. The baby's father, a well-respected physician, expects him to be named Gordon after himself and his son's grandfather. Cora's husband is abusive, however, as was his father, and she has unvoiced concerns that calling her son Gordon will perpetuate that "family tradition" as well. (She thinks to herself, "Do you not see that calling our son Gordon might mean he ends up like you?") Cora would prefer the name Julian, while Maia thinks Bear would be a wonderful name ("It sounds all soft and cuddly and kind ... But also, brave and strong.")
The section ends with Cora hesitating as she's about to fill in the baby's name on the paperwork. At that point, the plot splits into three parallel storylines, each of which follows the repercussions of Cora's choice. After we get an insight into each set of lives—Bear's family, Julian's, and finally Gordon's—the narrative skips ahead in seven-year chunks, revisiting the characters until Bear/Julian/Gordon turns 35.
The idea that one minor decision can influence the trajectory of someone's life is not new (there's even a fiction sub-genre called "sliding-door novels," named after a movie starring Gwyneth Paltrow that explored the notion). Knapp's treatment of this concept, however, is remarkable. She postulates that Cora's selection changes not only her son's future but also that of each member of the family, which in turn impacts those around them in a far-reaching web. Her husband's reaction to each name, in particular, sends each timeline careening in a wildly different direction.
Some aspects of the characters' lives are constant across all three stories, but even these traits differ depending on which name was chosen; Maia is gay in each, but she's strong and confident in one timeline, unsure of her sexuality in another, and completely closeted in the third. Part of what makes the novel so unputdownable is that many of the characters' actions are unpredictable, yet completely logical; we can see why each makes the decisions that they do, even if the choices surprise us.
Supporting characters add nuance, appearing in each tale to a greater or lesser degree depending on the direction their plot has taken (e.g., in one, Cora's mother is hugely influential, while in another she's barely mentioned). Although the cast is fairly large, no character is superfluous; each fills a vital role with his or her presence (or lack thereof) and all are drawn with impressive depth.
In addition to simply being a fascinating thought experiment—an exploration of "what if"— each storyline is engrossing in its own right. The book is almost like three exceptionally well-written novellas. Readers get wrapped up in the drama of whether Bear's romantic relationship will work out and if Julian will ever find his niche, for example.
One of the narrative's constants is that Cora is physically abused in all of the plotlines, and in some instances Knapp's descriptions are hard to read. It's particularly wrenching as readers watch the character overcome her circumstances in one story but not in the others; we grieve for her all the more because we've seen exactly what her life could have been like.
My only caveat is that due to the book's structure it's easy to confuse the three timelines. There's a Gordon, Cora, and Maia in each, but they're completely different characters with varying experiences depending on whether we're reading the chapter about Bear, Julian, or Gordon. Several times I had to stop and try to recall who was who, and about halfway through I started wishing I'd kept notes on the characters. This isn't a flaw in the author's technique, since given the parallel timelines there's really no avoiding this issue, but readers should be aware that this book may require more concentration than some.
I've been fortunate to have read many truly excellent books this year, but The Names has risen to the top of my list. I was awed by the author's technical prowess in creating such a unique, captivating novel, and surprised at how much I thoroughly enjoyed the plot and the characters. I highly recommend it to late-teen audiences and above, and I think that it would spark some great book group discussions as well.
Book reviewed by Kim Kovacs
In a key scene in Florence Knapp's novel The Names, two characters are in an art gallery viewing an exhibition. The author writes:
"They stop in front of a hideous image, a painting on loan from a gallery in Madrid. It shows a naked man, frenzied and wild-eyed, consuming a smaller figure, its bloodied, headless body clasped between his hands."
The work in question is entitled Saturn Devouring His Son and is by Spanish artist Francisco Goya (1746–1828), and it's one of 14 referred to as his Black Paintings (Pinturas negras).
Goya was a very successful artist and a court painter to two Spanish kings, credited with creating over 600 artworks during his lifetime. In 1792, his health began to decline; he started experiencing hallucinations, vertigo, hearing and speech impairment, and even fell into a coma for a time. Although not proven conclusively, it's thought his illness was likely due to lead poisoning brought on by excessive use of the metal in his white paint, which he mixed himself. In addition to the obvious and permanent physical symptoms, his work changed abruptly around this time, from courtly portraits to dark, disturbing images.
In 1819, as his health continued to deteriorate, Goya purchased an isolated estate on the outskirts of Madrid. He became reclusive and began painting grotesque images directly on the plaster walls of his home. The 14 works he ultimately completed from 1820 to 1823 are referred to as the Black Paintings both because of their preponderance of dark colors and their bleak, surreal subject matter.
No one's really sure what the artist intended with these images, although after his death sketches were found that seemed to indicate the works may have been a cycle laid out to a specific plan. Goya didn't give them names; in fact, it's believed that he never wrote or spoke about them at all. A few art historians speculate that the works aren't Goya's precisely because he made no reference to them (most scholars disagree).
In 1823 Goya donated the property to his 17-year-old grandson and departed Spain for Bordeaux, France, where he lived out the remainder of his life. The estate was left to deteriorate until purchased by Baron Frédéric-Emil d'Erlanger in 1873. Understanding the cultural value of the murals, their new owner had the paintings transferred from the building's walls to canvas, exhibiting them in 1878 at the International Exposition in Paris.
A technique known as "strappo" was used to preserve the pieces. A thin cloth is placed over the artwork and glue is brushed over it. This process is repeated many times before the covered art is left to dry. The top layer of the plaster—which hosts the painted image—is then carefully separated from the rest of the wall; the cloth holds the fragile medium together, thereby preserving the artwork. Excess plaster is removed, and then the same glueing procedure is used on the back of the now detached mural. The next step is to remove the cloth from the front of the painting one layer at a time, using hot water to melt the adhesive. The resulting painted layer of plaster can then be mounted on another medium, such as canvas. (See this YouTube video for a demonstration of this technique.)
The process wasn't foolproof, and Goya's paintings suffered significant damage. They were further harmed by their transfer to Paris and then back to Madrid. Frenchman Jean Laurent took photographs of the Black Paintings in 1873 before the strappo process was begun, and it's evident that the procedure changed them. Many paintings lost details (e.g., candles in one painting, a dog in another) and all experienced a muting of the colors Goya originally employed.
The Black Paintings remain permanently housed in Madrid's Prado Museum, which was visited by nearly 3.5 million people in 2024. Although no restoration efforts are currently underway, in 2014 Factum Arte was hired to digitize the works, creating high-resolution, 3-D images that are being used to bring new understanding to these remarkable pieces and their creator.
Francisco Goya, Saturn Devouring His Son, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
by Mark Whitaker
Malcolm X has become as much of an American icon as Abraham Lincoln, John F. Kennedy, or Martin Luther King. But when he was murdered in 1965, he was still seen as a dangerous outsider. White America found him alienating, mainstream African Americans found him divisive, and even his admirers found him bravely radical. Although Ossie Davis famously eulogized Malcolm X as "our own Black shining prince," he never received the mainstream acceptance toward which he seemed to be striving in his final year. It is more in death than his life that Malcolm's influence has blossomed and come to leave a deep imprint on the cultural landscape of America.
With impeccable research and original reporting, Mark Whitaker tells the story of Malcolm X's far-reaching posthumous legacy. It stretches from founders of the Black Power Movement such as Stokely Carmichael and Huey Newton to hip-hop pioneers such as Public Enemy and Tupac Shakur. Leaders of the Black Arts and Free Jazz movements from Amiri Baraka to Maya Angelou, August Wilson, and John Coltrane credited their political awakening to Malcolm, as did some of the most influential athletes of our time, from Muhammad Ali to Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and beyond. Spike's movie biopic and the Black Lives Matter movement reintroduced Malcolm to subsequent generations. Across the political spectrum, he has been cited as a formative influence by both Barack Obama—who venerated Malcolm's "unadorned insistence on respect"—and Clarence Thomas, who was drawn to Malcolm's messages of self-improvement and economic self-help.
In compelling new detail, Whitaker also retraces the long road to exoneration for two men wrongfully convicted of Malcolm's murder, making The Afterlife of Malcolm X essential reading for anyone interested in true crime, American politics, culture, and history.
In The Afterlife of Malcolm X, Mark Whitaker charts the ways that Malcolm X's views have been interpreted and mobilized to create new movements since his assassination in 1965. Many readers will know the general arc of Malcolm X's life: In prison as a young man, he discovered the Nation of Islam (NOI), a Black nationalist religious movement led by Elijah Muhammad (see Beyond the Book). Once out of prison, he quickly moved up the ranks of the organization and became its charismatic spokesman, speaking eloquently about the views that many people saw as radical and threatening: namely that, contra Martin Luther King, Jr. and other civil rights activists, Black freedom could not come from racial integration or nonviolence, but only from Black independence and Black people being able to defend themselves against white America.
But in 1964, Malcolm broke with the Nation of Islam and created his own Black nationalist movement, in a dramatic departure born partly from a personal rift with Elijah Muhammad and partly from a "hunger to be a constructive player in the civil rights struggle and not just a caustic critic." (Muhammad wanted to keep the Nation of Islam a tax-free religious organization.) He converted to mainstream Islam, promoted Pan-Africanism and brotherhood with people of color across the world who were struggling against colonial rule, and said he had "rearranged" some of his previous beliefs, including those of the NOI about white people being the source of the world's ills. But there was a target on his back; the Nation of Islam wanted him dead for defecting, and he knew it, but he still kept accepting speaking invitations, traveling, and gathering followers for his new movement. This is where Whitaker begins his book, just before Malcolm's death—Malcolm afraid of the Nation of Islam, knowing death is imminent, but convicted in his beliefs and their importance.
The drama of Malcolm's life and death is fascinating: the infighting and jealousy and shadowiness of the Nation of Islam; the question of who ordered his assassination; the botched detective work into his murder and even more botched trial that convicted two innocent men; the involvement of the FBI, who were spying on Malcolm, admitted to fueling the feud between Malcolm and Muhammad that led to Malcolm's death, and withheld evidence from the NYPD that could have saved those two men from wrongful conviction. Whitaker has pulled together a rich, expansive tapestry of the characters and relationships involved. These characters even involve reporters, like Peter Goldman, a white journalist who was close to Malcolm and wrote extensively about his assassination (and then later struck up a friendship with one of his convicted killers and helped exonerate him); the publishers of his bestselling, posthumous Autobiography; his alleged killers and their lawyers; and more. Those who know Malcolm's life mainly from his Autobiography may be surprised at how much there is to learn about these other players and how interesting it is to see different sides of Malcolm from their perspectives.
But The Afterlife of Malcolm X also traces the influence Malcolm had on people who were not directly involved in his life and death, and indeed, some who never even knew him, extending his tapestry further and further out, through decades and generations. The first wave of influence that Whitaker discusses, the Black Power movement, was started by people who had met Malcolm in life and were rocked by his death, including Stokely Carmichael, the future leader of the SNCC (the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee); and Huey Newton, who saw Malcolm speak in 1963 and started the Black Panther Party with Bobby Seale in Oakland a few years later (taking their name from a flyer made by Carmichael with a panther on it; Whitaker masterfully connects these myriad historical threads). Malcolm's call for armed defense influenced the Black Panthers' mission, which was to end police brutality by creating armed Black self-defense groups to defend their community from police. This is one of the most compelling sections of the book, perhaps because of how directly, and closely in time, the Black Power movement is linked to Malcolm's life. Even readers who know a lot about this historical moment will be interested in the connections Whitaker draws between Malcolm; Carmichael; the Black Panthers; Ron Karenga, the Black cultural nationalist who created Kwanzaa; and, of course, the FBI, who labeled the Black Panthers as a threat to domestic security, undermined their movement, and had a hand in the deaths of multiple members.
Not all of the other figures and cultural-political movements—including the birth of rap, Black Lives Matter, Spike Lee's oeuvre, and Obama's presidential campaign—that Whitaker discusses shine as brightly as that first category of influence. By the time he gets to our present movement, featuring an Afrofuturistic opera about Malcolm X and the life and death of his most recent biographer, things feel stretched a bit thin. But Whitaker does, admittedly, pull the reader along the decades smoothly, and many sections are incredibly compelling and even moving, like the chapter about Malcolm's friendship with Muhammad Ali and its ugly end after Malcolm broke with the NOI. The section about Malcolm's influence on Clarence Thomas, the Black conservative Supreme Court justice, is another standout. As his political beliefs were forming, Thomas has said, he found himself connecting with Malcolm's calls for Black self-reliance and his critique of the "false promise of racial integration"; Whitaker describes the line that can be drawn from those beliefs to some of his conservative opinions, like being against affirmative action, and quotes Thomas' former law clerk, who wrote that "Thomas' opinions thunder with [a] strong black-nationalist voice." Other scholars have said that Thomas' embrace of Malcolm X "rested on a gross distortion of what Malcolm really stood for," especially considering that some of his opinions, like opposing gun control and abortion, disproportionately harm Black people. Page by page, Whitaker builds a larger story about Malcolm's impact on American culture and politics, and about his evolving, multifaceted legacy.
In a way, The Afterlife of Malcolm X doesn't feel completely cohesive. A large part of the book is about the struggle, over decades, to free the two innocent men who were convicted of Malcolm's assassination and find his real killers. It feels strange to set these sections next to, for example, a chapter about the making of Spike Lee's movie Malcolm X, or next to an intricate history of his multiple biographers. But it does mostly work, because Whitaker is writing not just about Malcolm but about the ways that he has been reinterpreted, rediscovered, and reinvestigated over the years—the way his legacy will never be set in stone, and his position at the center of an interconnected web of figures and movements that spans decades, political beliefs, and races.
Book reviewed by Chloe Pfeiffer
Malcolm X rose to public prominence as one of the faces of the Nation of Islam, which is a Black nationalist and religious movement and organization. The Nation of Islam was founded in 1930 by Wallace D. Fard Muhammad, although he was soon succeeded by Elijah Muhammad, who grew the small group into an influential nationwide movement—influential enough to be deemed a threat to domestic security by the FBI, who gathered counterintelligence on the group and undertook actions to destabilize it. Muhammad promoted Black self-sufficiency, self-reliance, and separatism—challenging the message of the civil rights movement, which called for integration with whites and peaceful protest.
Malcolm X discovered Elijah Muhammad's teachings while in prison, as did many other incarcerated Black men in the 1950s and 1960s, which is when the movement began to gain popularity. The Nation of Islam's belief system is quite different from mainstream Islam and is really its own separate religion: In his book The Afterlife of Malcolm X, Mark Whitaker writes that the NOI teaches that Black people "were descended from a highly developed African civilization that existed for 666 trillion years before it was destroyed by a white race created in a laboratory experiment by a disaffected Black scientist named 'Yacub' … these white 'devils' had overwhelmed the Black race, forced them into bondage, and brought them to America as slaves. But then in the 1930s, the Islamic God Allah had appeared in Detroit in the human form of a man named Wallace Fard Muhammad."
Fard, then, found Elijah and anointed him as the apostle who would lead Black Americans to salvation. Journalist Peter Goldman, writing about the NOI in the 1960s, said that their teachings consisted of a stew of "orthodox Islamic doctrine, reinterpreted Biblical parables, historical fact and fancy, Puritanical morality, 'buy-black' economics, doomsday prophecy, racism, nationalism and lesser ingredients."
As "outlandish" as the NOI's origin story and belief system may sound, it attracted tens of thousands of followers for understandable reasons. One was that it gave impoverished and imprisoned Black people a concrete explanation for their suffering—the belief that white people were inherently evil creatures engineered to do them harm. Another was that the strict code of conduct—no drinking, smoking, swearing, promiscuity, eating pork, going to night clubs, and more—helped people battle addictions and impose discipline on their lives. Malcolm X's charismatic speeches and calls for Black people to love themselves—which meant seeing white people as the enemy, but which fundamentally came from a place of love, he said—also resonated with people.
The Nation of Islam, at this time, was not the first or only Black separatist movement. Fard drew upon Garveyism, the Black separatist movement led by Marcus Garvey that was popular in the 1920s (indeed, Malcolm X's parents were Garveyites). Garvey called for Black self-determination and the creation of a new Black nation in Africa; he was Pan-African and emphasized the unity between diasporic African Americans in the United States and Blacks in Africa, who were suffering under European colonial rule there. On the other hand, the Nation of Islam focuses on uniting African Americans in the US.
Malcolm X later split with the Nation of Islam, partly because he discovered that Elijah Muhammad had impregnated multiple secretaries who worked for him—women who were, hypocritically, publicly shamed for breaking the rules about unmarried sex. (When Malcolm confronted him about it, Muhammad "insisted that he was fulfilling his divine destiny, comparing himself to biblical patriarchs who had multiple wives," Whitaker writes.) When Malcolm started his new Black nationalist movement, he focused on Pan-Africanism and promoting brotherhood among people of color all over the world.
Logo at the Nation of Islam headquarters in Indianapolis
Sarah Stierch (CC BY 4.0), via Wikimedia Commons
by Alison Bechdel
In Alison Bechdel's hilariously skewering and gloriously cast new comic novel confection, a cartoonist named Alison Bechdel, running a pygmy goat sanctuary in Vermont, is existentially irked by a climate-challenged world and a citizenry on the brink of civil war. She wonders: Can she pull humanity out of its death spiral by writing a scathingly self-critical memoir about her own greed and privilege?
Meanwhile, Alison's first graphic memoir about growing up with her father, a taxidermist who specialized in replicas of Victorian animal displays, has been adapted into a highly successful TV series. It's a phenomenon that makes Alison, formerly on the cultural margins, the envy of her friend group (recognizable as characters, now middle-aged and living communally in Vermont, from Bechdel's beloved comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For).
As the TV show Death and Taxidermy racks up Emmy after Emmy—and when Alison's Pauline Bunyanesque partner Holly posts an instructional wood-chopping video that goes viral—Alison's own envy spirals. Why couldn't she be the writer for a critically lauded and wildly popular reality TV show…like Queer Eye...showing people how to free themselves from consumer capitalism and live a more ethical life?!!
Spent's rollicking and masterful denouement—making the case for seizing what's true about life in the world at this moment, before it's too late—once again proves that "nobody does it better" (New York Times Book Review) than the real Alison Bechdel.
They say every author puts a little of themselves into their work, but the brilliant Alison Bechdel has taken the expression to a new level in Spent, a rollicking, metafictional graphic novel. Bechdel has inserted herself and her real-life partner Holly into a somewhat heightened reality in which she confronts aging, attempts to maintain artistic integrity in the age of the viral video, and spends some time with old friends from her literary past.
Bechdel's readers will be familiar with her skyrocketing rise to fame after the release of her coming-of-age graphic memoir Fun Home, which centered on her fraught relationship with her father, who ran a funeral home out of their house and alternately terrorized and fascinated his family; the book was aptly subtitled "a family tragicomic" and was subsequently turned into an award-winning Broadway show. Her more hardcore fans will fondly recall her fabulous Dykes to Watch Out For comic strip (see Beyond the Book), which she published in queer and alternative newspapers from 1983 to 2008. The comic followed a circle of lesbian friends as they navigated relationships, bitched about their jobs, and strove for equality and better lives for their community.
Spent takes these two worlds—the reality of Bechdel's life as a famous cartoonist and the fictional world of her early work—and throws them together to create a mashup of real life and fantasy, in which Bechdel reexamines her artistic career and struggles to decide if her work has made the difference she was hoping it would. Has she done her part to make the world a better, more accepting place, or is she just another sellout, happy to cash in her royalty check and run her rescue pygmy goat farm? Has she, in fact, become the thing she once swore to fight to her dying breath?
Spent has changed some aspects of Bechdel's life: In the book, her late father was not a funeral director but a taxidermist with a penchant for stuffing endangered animals; and instead of a Broadway musical, her landmark graphic novel has become a multi-season HBO series called Death and Taxidermy, adored by millions but detested by Alison, although the money has been nice. The friends she and Holly meet up with for watch parties turn out to be several of the core characters from Dykes to Watch Out For, who have a few more grey hairs but are still striving to live their best, most authentic lives in the 2020s. Lois, who spent her youth as an unapologetic lothario and champion for social justice, has been besieged by internet trolls and death threats after FOX News aired footage of her leading a Gender Identity and Expression class. Stuart and Sparrow, DTWOF's longest running couple, are confronting an empty nest and the possibility of becoming a throuple with an old friend now that their non-binary child J.R. is gone at college. And professor Ginger is still navigating the murky waters of academia, though she's finally overcome her commitment phobia and is in a loving long-distance relationship.
As for Alison, with Death and Taxidermy in its final season, she needs to get herself in gear with a new book: $um: An Accounting, a new memoir about money, or "a lens into the over-consumption, inequality, endless growth and media consolidation of late-stage capitalism!" She needs the money—she and Holly can't afford their comfortable life in Vermont on Holly's revenue from her handmade compost bin business alone. (Those pygmy goats aren't going to feed themselves!) Then, as she struggles to overcome her writer's block, one of Holly's woodworking videos goes viral and Alison suddenly finds herself part of the problem—the attention-span-destroying, sheep-creating, megacorp problem—and not the scrappy warrior for social justice she always envisioned herself as.
This is a hilarious and utterly charming graphic novel that has all the self-deprecating wit and wisdom readers have come to expect from Bechdel. With her tongue firmly planted in her cheek, she lovingly skewers the forward-thinking, socially conscious intellectuals who struggle tirelessly against "the man" but would also like to keep their Amazon deliveries and rack up their TikTok likes. It also reads as a love letter to the wonderful and wacky Dykes to Watch Out For characters she clearly adores, a sort of literary thank you to them for helping her toward the success she enjoys today. Seeing so many beloved faces from Bechdel's formative and inspiring comic after many years away is sure to be a heartwarming experience for any DTWOF fan. Bechdel provided deeply meaningful representation for many marginalized people at a time when such a thing was hard to find, and it feels wonderfully right for her to give her readers time with them again.
Community and the power it has to cultivate love and positive change in the world is always at the heart of Bechdel's work. The biggest struggle for DTWOF's protagonist, Mo, was always an inability to understand the inherent value in turning to community in times of need and hardship. When book-Alison finally overcomes her writer's block, she declares that "I figured out what was wrong with me! I was paralyzed because I thought I somehow had to fix everything myself."
Bechdel also excels at reminding her readers of the beauty of the quieter moments in life, like Alison preparing an elaborate coffee tray for Holly every morning, and Sparrow and Stuart embracing their polyamorous relationship: "How did we ever fall for the idea that love was finite?" Sparrow muses to Stuart after spending their first night with another. There might be a few more lines on their faces and grey hairs on their heads, but Bechdel and her fictional, funny friends have never been more relevant or more needed.
Book reviewed by Sara Fiore
Alison Bechdel's new graphic novel Spent revisits several of the beloved characters that Bechdel made somewhat famous in her long-running comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For. Though it was never published in mainstream publications, the strip was a mainstay in gay and lesbian publications for over 25 years.
Dykes to Watch Out For began in 1986 with a series of one-off comics poking loving fun at life as a lesbian in the 20th century. But it wasn't long before the comic strip began to follow specific characters as they lived their lives, lamented their relationships (or lack thereof), and sought out their own versions of the American dream.
Lovingly referred to by critics as the "greatest lesbian soap opera" and by Bechdel herself as "half op-ed column and half endlessly serialized Victorian novel," DTWOF commented on everything from sex to public education, and never shied away from the harsher realities of living as a queer person in America.
At the center of the narrative sat Mo Testa, a stand-in for Bechdel in looks, if not in temperament. A constant ball of nervous, needy energy, Mo could never seem to find satisfaction in either her relationships or professional life, choosing instead to live in a perpetual state of angst and guilt over not doing enough to fix the world. She was surrounded by a circle of women, many of them minorities who had been underrepresented in comics: Mo found her support network in Sparrow, an Asian American woman who ran a homeless shelter and shared a communal house with Lois, a presumably white sex-positive free spirit; and Ginger, a Black woman fighting for equal footing in the white male-dominated world of academia. Toni and Clarice, a Latinx accountant and a Black lawyer, whose story centered on the struggle for marriage equality and, later, raising their son Raffi, rounded out the group. Love interests and friends moved in and out of a narrative that gave voice to many people who had never seen themselves in work like this before.
Though it had a devoted fanbase within the queer community and women's studies spaces, it was not until the success of Fun Home in 2006 that Dykes to Watch Out For was widely discovered. "The strip is sexy, sometimes in an R-rated way—imagine 'Doonesbury' with regular references to sex toys—and it's political, in a feisty, lefty, Greenpeace meets PETA meets MoveOn.org kind of way," the New York Times wrote in 2008.
DTWOF is also the origin of the well-known cultural litmus test called the Bechdel-Wilson test, known more commonly as the Bechdel test. In an early DTWOF comic, two women are discussing what movie they want to see, and one describes her rule for whether a movie is worth watching: It must 1) feature two female characters who 2) engage in a conversation with each other about 3) anything other than a man. While Bechdel may have created the strip and is usually the one who receives credit for the test, she is quick to point out that it was her friend Liz Wallace who gave her the idea.
Though Bechdel has long retired Mo and her friends—the hiatus began when she started work on what would eventually become her second graphic memoir, Are You My Mother?—the strip lives on through her blog, multiple collections and compendiums, and the fans who still cherish the early work of a truly gifted artist with a charming, insightful, and endlessly funny voice.
by K. Ancrum
Hollis Brown is stuck. Born to a blue-collar American Dream, Hollis lives in a rotting small town where no one can afford to leave. Hollis's only bright spots are his two best friends, cool girls Annie and Yulia, and the thrill of fighting his classmates.
As if his circumstances couldn't get worse, a chance encounter with a mysterious stranger named Walt results in a frightening trap. After unknowingly making a deal at the crossroads, Hollis finds himself losing control of his body and mind, falling victim to possession. Walt, the ghost making a home inside him, has a deep and violent history rooted in the town Hollis grew up in and he has unfinished business to take care of.
As Walt and Hollis begin working together to put Walt's spirit to rest, an unspeakable bond forms between them, and the boys begin falling for one another in unexpected ways. But it's only a matter of time before Hollis's best friends begin to notice that something about Hollis isn't quite…right.
With the threat of a long-overdue exorcism looming before them, will Walt and Hollis be able to protect their love and undo the curse that turned their town from a garden of possibility into a place where dreams go to die?
"Corruption" seems like an accurate way to refer to the possession of a person's body against their will, which is what happens to the titular character in K. Ancrum's young adult novel The Corruption of Hollis Brown. The word could also gesture to the chilling history of the book's setting, a rural Michigan town shaped by a past of enforced poverty and family-run organized crime. At the opening of the story, this history surrounds disgruntled teenager Hollis, who lives with his parents in this place left behind following a mythical, uneven time of American prosperity, a place where people commute for hours to work, where high school students have a hard future ahead of them without the promise of a college scholarship. Then, when his body is taken over by Walt, the ghost of a boy who lived in the 1920s, the past is literally in him.
Unlike the static circumstances in which Hollis has spent his youth, Walt is in flux. A wandering spirit who needs a host to survive, he infiltrates Hollis as he's walking home one night, an act necessarily violent in its force. But the two soon begin to communicate, negotiate, and even understand each other — albeit with plenty of friction — through the thoughts they share (with their "dialogue" rendered for the reader in contrasting bold and italicized text). This leads to drama involving Rose Town, an industrial settlement mostly left alone by present-day residents of the area; and romance, as Hollis's longstanding unrequited attraction to his friend Annie Watanabe begins to shift in a different direction.
The Corruption of Hollis Brown is not so much a genuinely scary story as one that uses elements of horror and the supernatural to paint an enhanced portrait of life for young rural people abandoned by the contemporary world. The harshness of the setting easily blends with adolescent angst. Hollis has been carrying general feelings of frustration and depression since long before Walt came on the scene; he often gets into fights, which Annie and their friend Yulia Egunyemi berate him for ("The thing about being friends with only girls was that they held him accountable for his actions"); and he has a quasi-suicidal habit of standing dangerously close to the tracks as a train rips past.
The resourcefulness of Hollis's family, their ability to redefine and beautify the bleakness around them, seems intertwined with the inventiveness of the book's diverse cast of young queer people discovering themselves and each other, exploring possibilities for relationships, gender roles, and ways of being that are not necessarily clearly modeled for them. This inventiveness extends to the larger community, as Hollis dreams, rather than of escaping, of helping his town attain self-sufficiency through sustainable means. The cozier parts of the story — tender confidences between friends, Hollis and his mother saving on groceries with baking, cheesemaking, and preserving — are the building blocks for its vividly harmonious world; and as Hollis makes mozzarella and pays Yulia back for her kindnesses to him with sweet potato bread, readers can follow along with recipes Ancrum provides.
The novel clocks in at nearly 400 pages but comes in an accessible presentation, with short chapters that leave beats of white space in between. Like Ancrum's previous novel Icarus, this book focuses on bodily intimacy, taking it to a new level with the concept of negotiating privacy, touch, and eroticism between two consciousnesses in one human form. Her minimalist writing style, which often forgoes description and immerses the reader in character, action, and dialogue, creates space for the immediacy of Hollis's physical world and emphasizes what a strange, jarring, and beautiful experience it is to exist in a body over a lifetime — even while not sharing one with a ghost.
Despite its relative lack of description, The Corruption of Hollis Brown leaves the reader with the impression of a delicate series of images. It is romantic in nearly every sense of the word, and buzzes with understated drama. With insights to impart about queerness, family, masculinity, community, and baked goods, it pulls social commentary and history into the sweet, bold story of a boy and his loved ones.
Book reviewed by Elisabeth Cook
In The Corruption of Hollis Brown by K. Ancrum, Walt, a ghost who was born in approximately 1916, shares a body with Hollis, a teenage boy he possesses in order to survive. As the two are still working out how to exist as one person, communicating through their shared mind with tensions and resentments lingering between them, Walt peers into Hollis's family's pantry and becomes emotional. Spotting a jar of pickled asparagus, he asks Hollis, "You're still doing this here…?" Noticing his dismay, Hollis replies, "Don't worry. Along with Little House on the Prairie, I've also read The Jungle. You can close the pantry and walk away if it's too traumatizing for you to look at." "You don't know what it was like," Walt tells him. "If you did, it would never occur to you to be cruel."
In this scene, Hollis is referencing The Jungle by Upton Sinclair, a 1906 novel that skewered the notion of the American dream by exposing shocking working conditions and corruption. Hollis is using Sinclair's work to mock Walt and the poverty he possibly lived through, because he's still mad about Walt possessing him. He's also still trying to feel out what era Walt is from and what his life was like, and has hit relatively close with his insinuations.
Sinclair's story follows a Lithuanian immigrant named Jurgis Rudkus and his family, who struggle to survive in Chicago, experiencing exploitation and assault, illness, and a seemingly neverending cycle of poverty and desperation. The novel is considered the most influential work among the muckrakers of the early 20th century — writers who tried to call attention to the corruption entwined with the industrialization of the day. As research, Sinclair visited Chicago meatpacking plants undercover. He wanted to show the wider American public what factory labor conditions were like and to foster social change, but the reaction was not what he had hoped for. Many people were shocked and disgusted by what Sinclair's work revealed about the treatment of their food, which led to the passage of legislation that helped set a precedent for food quality and sanitation, but less concerned about the unfair labor practices often faced by immigrants.
A Guardian article by Gary Younge from 2006, one hundred years after The Jungle's publication, pointed out that many of the same societal problems persisted, the main difference being the ethnicities of those subjected to dangerous labor conditions, with a large portion of meatpacking workers being Hispanic. Today, the majority of the industry's workforce continues to be made up of immigrants and racially marginalized people.
It isn't surprising that Walt and Hollis are both familiar with The Jungle, and that the book is fresh in Hollis's mind, because it frequently appears in high school curricula. It is often viewed as more of a historical text that illuminates the issues of the time than as a serious work of literature. Despite this, it remains one of the most influential American novels, and has done what fiction is often not considered to be capable of doing: directly inspiring social change.
Cover of Penguin Classics Deluxe edition of The Jungle by Upton Sinclair, courtesy of Penguin Random House
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